TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.025

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.4 KB | 104 lines

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                                                            THE UNION, Page 66

GO FASTER! NO! GO SLOWER!

PUSHING FORWARD


In advancing his agenda, Gorbachev faces growing pressure from
two opposite camps: the liberals and the conservatives


    Let's Think a Bit More, Estonian television's live talk
show, has a reputation for being a glasnost groundbreaker, but
few who tuned in one Wednesday evening nearly a year ago were
quite prepared for what happened. During a debate about making
the political system more democratic, a novel notion came up.
Why not unite people who support perestroika into something
resembling the popular-front movements that lobbied for social
reforms in Europe during the 1930s? For a moment, the question
hung in the air. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the
Soviet Union. Telephone lines soon jangled with enthusiastic
offers of support. When the broadcast ended at midnight, excited
participants remained in the Tallinn studio to draft a
manifesto.

    Estonia -- or the Soviet Union, for that matter -- has not
been the same since that night of April 13, 1988. Certainly,
life changed dramatically for Marju Lauristin, 48, a journalism
professor who had watched the show at home in the university
city of Tartu. Inviting other activists to her apartment, she
helped write the founding declaration of the Estonian Popular
Front. Less than three weeks later, local party officials gave
the group guarded approval to organize.

    When Mikhail Gorbachev first sowed the seeds of democracy,
no one could have foreseen that they would mature so quickly
into grass-roots revolutions like the Estonian Popular Front.
There may be times, in fact, when the Soviet leader must wonder
if he has planted a brier patch. The Estonian initiative has
given rise to other popular fronts in the Baltic states, but its
indirect impact has been far greater. It has become a model for
an amorphous mass of unofficial political groupings and
single-issue movements across the country, championing causes
long ignored by the party and government bureaucracy: cleaning
up the Volga River, stopping the building of nuclear power
plants, preserving historical monuments, fostering the study of
regional languages.

    A petite woman with gray hair, Lauristin may seem an
unlikely revolutionary, but she is as much a rebel in her own
way as was her father Johannes, a prominent Estonian Bolshevik.
Her Popular Front has taken the organizational model of the
party and turned it upside down. The movement promotes no rigid
political platform, except a general commitment to democracy and
pluralism, and welcomes everyone into its ranks. Its central
steering committee is an umbrella organization for dozens of
local chapters that open their doors to any citizens' groups
with a worthy cause. In Tartu the Popular Front joined with the
environmentalist Greens and the local branch of a
monument-preservation society to stage an evening of "public
accounting," during which municipal leaders ran a gauntlet of
tough questioning. Says Lauristin: "We are seeking a way to make
the transition from totalitarianism to democracy and begin a
normal exchange between the authorities and the people."

    The movement's success in channeling public opinion has
been impressive. When party First Secretary Karl Vaino tried to
pick delegates to the All-Union Party conference last summer,
the Popular Front announced a mass meeting. One day before the
rally, the imperious party boss was replaced by Gorbachev
protege Vaino Valjas. In November the Estonian supreme soviet,
with strong Popular Front backing, turned down new
election-reform laws that it considered an infringement on the
republic's sovereignty, triggering a showdown with the Kremlin.
Says Lauristin: "It was the first conflict between perestroika
from above and perestroika from below, but it helped both sides
to make contact."

    Though the confrontation with Moscow has eased, tensions
still linger, particularly within the republic's
Russian-speaking minority. The Russians are concerned that the
Estonian-dominated Popular Front is bent on carrying out a
nationalist agenda that will turn them into second-class
citizens and ultimately lead to a break with the Soviet Union.
Such fears have been fanned by the rival Russian-led
Intermovement, which has attacked popular-front activists as
"counterrevolutionaries." Lauristin worries about the Stalinist
clang of such rhetoric and cites it as an example of a
continuing "colonial mentality." Says she: "This is not an
ethnic problem. It is a problem of differences in political
culture and language."

    The Estonian community is a unique social laboratory for
grass-roots democracy. It is a highly literate, culturally
homogeneous group, shaped by a brief interlude as an
independent republic between the two World Wars. What has been
so astonishing is how the ideas of the Popular Front have spread
elsewhere. Officials in other republics have accused the
movement of sending "emissaries," but as Lauristin points out,
Estonians traveling outside the republic these days get besieged
with questions. "The movement has become like an exploding
supernova," says Lauristin, elected last week to the Congress
of People's Deputies. "The power given off by this new star of
democracy has been so great that it has radiated across the
Soviet Union." Now, even the Kremlin will have to brush up on
its astronomy.